Hacker News Reader

Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

> It looks like deb files only can be installed via the terminal.

Oh, I did not even notice that during 4+ weeks on the unreleased Xubuntu Focal because I never use anything else but the command line to install software. But the target audience Ubuntu is wider, so I think that is a very bad change. One might think they have learned from https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 , but obviously not. Well, formally they declared bug #1 solved, but few would agree that the Linux desktop has won.

How does the snap "repo" compare to the Ubuntu repos in terms of count? I would have guessed it's orders of magnitude. Even if many of the packages might not be useful for those requiring an installation GUI.

View on HN

One can dpkg -i , but, how about dependencies? I always had a problem with that. Whenever the app-store didn't work, which usually pulled-in all deps, I just naively used dpkg -i pkg.deb, and chased all the deps manually, through google. I have done that at least. Thank god for arch. No politics/"religion(s/*)" intended.

apt is your friend. Or apt-get if you prefer old school. Or aptitude if you are willing to learn something pretty powerful.

huh how well does that work with individual downloaded *.deb packages? You're probably right, but, the included repos are usually full of outdated versions, if you get a too-new deb, from some experimental site, in terms of Ubuntu freshness, and then no pkgs in the repo will have a new enough version. (In terms of dependencies for the local exteriorally-gotten base pkg.deb and it's deps,) I guess ppa's are a thing, but, yeah, good to be off this train, no disrespects to Ubuntu, if it picks up I will surely be glad, and even, chances are slim, ever use it again. We're all friends, let's say yes to progress, in general, in the right directions.

> huh how well does that work with individual downloaded *.deb packages?

You can `apt` to install `.deb` files on the local file system using:

    apt install ./path_to_the.deb

And it will take care of all dependencies? What if the repo packages are version < 2.4 or something, I have ran into that a tons of times. Yeah rather the AUR than the ppas to be frankly these days. I love Ubuntu though, as a general idea. Let's just hope it works sometime. Bit disappointing the last few releases. If it ever truly wasn't. Just gave up after 14.04. Tried to like it but I failed.

Since when, that's cool, I've been dpkg-ing my downloads. Then apt-fix-ing them to get necessary dependencies.

Apt is the best way, but if you don't want to or can't use apt, then try gdebi, which does the dependency chasing for a .deb you give it.

Yeah I was probably just ignorant using dpkg, didn't know better. Thanks for the info.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com